There was a long second where the five thugs stared at the knife on the floor at Amos’ feet, and he stared back at them. The emptiness in his belly was gone. The hollow space behind his sternum, gone. His throat had stopped hurting.
“Who’s next?” he said, flexing his hands, his face in a grin he didn’t know he had.
They came in a rush. Amos spread his arms and welcomed them like long-lost lovers.
“You okay?” Rico asked. He was dabbing at a small cut on Amos’ head with an alcohol swab.
“Mostly.”
“They okay?”
“Less so,” Amos said, “but still mostly. Everyone will walk out of there when they wake up.”
“You didn’t have to do that for me. I would have paid.”
“Didn’t,” Amos said. At Rico’s puzzled look he added, “Didn’t do it for you. And Rico? That money goes into the Wendy fund, or I come looking for you too.”
Chapter Five: Holden
One of Holden’s grandfathers had spent his youth riding in rodeos. All of the pictures they had of him were of a tall, muscular, robust-looking man with a big belt buckle and a cowboy hat. But the man Holden had known when he was a child was thin, pale, and hunched over. As if the years had stripped away everything extraneous and rendered the younger man down into the skeletal older man he became.
It struck him that Fred Johnson had been rendered.
He was still a tall man, but the heavy muscles he’d once had were mostly gone, leaving loose skin at the backs of his arms and on his neck. His hair had gone from mostly black to mostly gray to mostly not there at all. That he could still project an air of absolute authority meant that very little of it had come from his physicality in the first place.
Fred had two glasses and a bottle of something dark on the desk when Holden sat. He offered a drink with a small tilt of his head, and Holden accepted with a nod. While Fred poured, Holden leaned back in his chair with a long sigh, then said, “Thank you.”
Fred shrugged. “I was looking for an excuse.”
“Not the drink, but thanks for that too. Thank you for helping with the Roci. The money from Avasarala came, but we have damage we didn’t know about when I wrote the bill. Without our favored client discount, we’d been in trouble.”
“Who says you’re getting a discount?” Fred said as he handed Holden the drink, but he smiled as he said it. He sank into his own chair with a grunt. Holden hadn’t realized coming in how much he was dreading the conversation. Even if he knew it was just good business negotiation, it felt like asking for a handout. That the answer had been yes was good. That Fred hadn’t made him squirm about it was even better. Made him feel more like he was sitting with a friend.
“You look old, Fred.”
“I feel old. But it’s better than the alternative.”
Holden raised his glass. “Those who aren’t with us.”
“Those who aren’t with us,” Fred repeated, and they both drank. “That list is getting longer every time I see you.”
“I’m sorry about Bull, but I think he may have saved the solar system. From what I knew of him, he’d think that was pretty kick-ass.”
“Bull,” Fred said, raising his glass again.
“And Sam,” Holden added, raising his own.
“I’m leaving soon, so I wanted to check in with you.”
“Wait. Leaving? Like leaving leaving, or like Bull and Sam leaving?”
“You’re not rid of me yet. I need to get back out to Medina Station,” Fred said. He poured himself a little more bourbon, frowning down at the glass like it was a delicate operation. “That’s where all the action is.”
“Really? I thought I heard something about the UN secretary-general and the Martian prime minister having a sit-down. I thought you’d be heading to that.”
“They can talk all they want. The real power’s in the geography. Medina’s in the hub where all the rings connect. That’s where the power is going to be for a good long time.”
“How long do you think the UN and Mars keep letting you run that show? You have a head start, but they have a bunch of really dangerous ships to throw at you if they decide they want your stuff.”
“Avasarala and I are back channeling a lot of this. We’ll keep it from getting out of hand.” Fred paused to take a long drink. “But we have two big problems.”
Holden put down the glass. He was starting to get the sense that him asking for – and getting – the discount on repairs might not actually have been the end of the negotiation after all.
“Mars,” Holden said.
“Yes, Mars is dying,” Fred agreed with a nod. “No stopping that. But we also have a bunch of OPA extremists making noise. The Callisto attack last year was their work. The water riot on Pallas Station. And there have been other things. Piracy’s up, and more of those ships have a split circle painted on them than I’d like.”
“I’d think any problems they had would be solved by everyone getting their own free planet.”
Fred took another pull of his drink before he answered. “Their position is that the Belter culture is one adapted to space. The prospect of new colonies with air and gravity reduces the economic base that Belters depend on. Forcing everyone to go down a gravity well is the moral equivalent of genocide.”
Holden blinked. “Free planets are genocide?”
“They argue that being adapted to low g isn’t a disability, it’s who they are. They don’t want to go live on a planet, so we’re killing them off.”
“Okay, I can see not wanting to spend six months pumped full of steroids and bone growth stimulators. But how are we killing them?”
“For one thing, not all of them can tolerate that. But that’s not really the point. It’s that this,” Fred said, waving at the space station around them, “is pretty much over once everyone has a planet. For generations, at the minimum. Maybe forever. No reason to dump resources into the outer planets or mining the Belt when we can find the same stuff down a well and get free air and water to boot.”
“So once they don’t have anything anyone wants, they’ll just starve to death out here?”
“That’s how they see it,” Fred said. He and Holden shared a quiet moment while they drank.
“Yeah,” Holden finally said. “Well, they’ve got a point. But I don’t know what they can do about it.”
“There are people trying to figure that out. But it’s ramping up.”
“Callisto and Pallas.”
“And more recently they ran an attack on Earth with an old mothballed heavy freighter.”
Holden laughed. “I haven’t read that Earth got bombed, so that must not have worked.”
“Well, it was a suicide attack, and the suicide half worked. The UN fleet in high orbit patrol reduced the freighter to gas a tenth of an AU from the planet. No damage, not much press. But it’s possible those were all preliminary. That they’re planning some big showy statement about how the Belt can’t be ignored. The thing that scares the shit out of me is that no one can figure out what it will be.”
The gently sloping main corridor of the Tycho Station habitation ring was filled with workers. Holden didn’t pay much attention to the station schedules, but he assumed the crowds passing him meant it was shift change. Either that, or an orderly evacuation with no alarms sounding.
“Yo! Holden,” someone said as they passed.
“Hey,” Holden said, not sure who he was saying it to.
Celebrity was not something he’d figured out how to handle, yet. People would point, stare, whisper to each other when he walked by. He knew it generally wasn’t intended as insult. Just the surprise people felt when someone they’d only seen on video screens before suddenly appeared in the real world. Most of the murmured conversations, when he could overhear them, consisted of Is that James Holden? I think that’s James Holden.
“Holden,” a woman walking toward him down the corridor said, “what’s up?”
There were fifteen thousand
people on Tycho, working in three different shifts. It was like a small city in space. He couldn’t remember if the woman speaking to him was someone he should know or not, so he just smiled and said, “Hey, how’s it going?”
“Same same,” she said as they passed.
When he reached the door to his apartment it was a relief that the only person inside was Naomi. She sat at the dining table, a steaming mug of tea in front of her, a distant look in her eyes. Holden couldn’t tell if she was melancholy or solving a complex engineering problem in her head. Those looks were confusingly similar.
He pulled himself a cup of water out of the kitchen tap, then sat across from her waiting for her to speak first. She looked up through her hair at him and gave him a sad smile. Melancholy, then, not engineering.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey.”
“So I have a thing.”
“Is it a thing I can fix?” Holden asked. “Point me at the thing.”
Naomi sipped at her tea, buying time. Not a good sign, because it meant this was something she wasn’t sure how to talk about. Holden felt his stomach muscles tightening.
“That’s kind of the problem, actually,” she said. “I need to go do something, and I can’t have you involved in it. At all. Because if you are, you’ll try to fix it and you can’t do that.”
“I don’t understand,” Holden said.
“When I come back, I promise full and complete disclosure.”
“Wait. Come back? Where are you going?”
“Ceres, to start,” Naomi said. “But it may be more than that. I’m not sure how long I’ll be gone.”
“Naomi,” Holden said, reaching across the table to take her hand. “You’re scaring the shit out of me right now. There’s no way you can jet off to Ceres without me. Especially if it’s something bad, and I’m getting the feeling it’s something really bad.”
Naomi put down her tea, and gripped his hand in both of hers. The fingers that had been holding the mug were warm, the others cool. “Except that is what’s happening. There’s no negotiation on this. So, either I go because you understand and will give me the space to handle this on my own, or I go because we’ve broken up and you no longer get any vote in what I do.”
“Wait, what?”
“Have we broken up?” Naomi asked. She squeezed his hand.
“No, of course not.”
“Then thank you for trusting me enough to let me handle this on my own.”
“Is that what I just said?” Holden asked.
“Yeah, pretty much.” Naomi stood up. She had a packed duffel on the floor next to her chair that Holden hadn’t seen. “I’ll be in touch when I can, but if I can’t, don’t read anything into it. Okay?”
“Okay,” Holden replied. The whole scene had taken on a vaguely dreamlike feel. Naomi, standing at the end of the table holding her olive-green duffel bag, seemed very far away. The room felt bigger than it was, or else Holden had shrunk. He stood up too, and vertigo made him dizzy.
Naomi dropped the duffel on the table and wrapped both arms around him. Her chin was against his forehead when she whispered, “I’ll be back. I promise.”
“Okay,” he said again. His brain had lost the ability to form any other words.
After one last tight squeeze, she picked up her bag and walked to the door.
“Wait!” he said.
She looked back.
“I love you.”
“I love you too,” she said, and then was gone.
Holden sat back down, because it was that or sink to the floor. He finally pulled himself out of the chair a minute or an hour later; it was hard to tell. He had almost called Amos to join him for a drink when he remembered Amos and Alex were gone too.
Everyone was.
It was strange how nothing could change while everything did. He still got up every morning, brushed his teeth, put on a fresh set of clothes, and ate breakfast. He arrived at the repair docks by nine a.m. local time, put on a vacuum suit, and joined the crew working on the Rocinante. For eight hours he’d climb through the skeletal ribs of the ship, attaching conduit, installing replacement maneuvering thrusters, patching holes. He didn’t know how to do everything that needed to be done, but he wanted to, so he shadowed the technicians doing the really complicated work.
It all felt very normal, very routine, almost like still having his old life.
But then he’d return to his apartment eight hours later and no one would be there. He was truly alone for the first time in years. Amos wouldn’t come by asking him to hit a bar. Alex wouldn’t watch the video streams sitting on his couch and making sarcastic comments to the screen. Naomi wouldn’t be there to ask about his day and compare notes on how the repairs were coming. The rooms even smelled empty.
It wasn’t something about himself he’d ever had to face before, but Holden was coming to realize how much he needed family. He’d grown up with eight parents, and a seemingly endless supply of grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. When he’d left Earth for the Navy, he’d spent four years at the academy with roommates and classmates and girlfriends. Even after his dishonorable discharge, he’d gone straight to work for Pur’N’Kleen on the Canterbury and a whole new loose-knit family of coworkers and friends. Or if not family, at least people.
The only two people he’d been close with on Tycho were Fred, so busy with his political machinations he barely had time to breathe, and Sam, who’d died in the slow zone years ago. The new Sam – Sakai – was a competent engineer and seemed to take fixing his ship seriously, but had expressed no interest in any association outside of that.
So Holden spent a lot of time in bars.
The Blauwe Blome was too noisy and too filled with people who knew Naomi but not him. The places close to the docks were full of boisterous workers coming off shift and picking a fight with a famous guy seemed like a great way to blow off steam. Anyplace else with more than four people in it at a time turned into line up to have your picture taken with James Holden then ask him personal questions for an hour. So, he found a small restaurant nestled in a side corridor between a residential section and a strip of commercial shopping outlets. It specialized in what the Belters were calling Italian food and had a small bar in a back room that everyone seemed to ignore.
Holden could sit at a tiny table skimming the latest news on his hand terminal, reading messages, and finally check out all the books he’d downloaded over the last six years. The bar served the same food as the restaurant out front, and while it was not something anyone from Earth would have mistaken for Italian, it was edible. The cocktails were mediocre and cheap.
It might almost have been tolerable if Naomi hadn’t seemingly fallen out of the universe. Alex sent regular updates about where he was and what he was up to. Amos had his terminal automatically send a message letting Holden know his flight had landed on Luna, and then New York. From Naomi, nothing. She still existed, or at least her hand terminal did. The messages he sent arrived somewhere. He never got a failed connection from the network. But the successfully received message was his only reply.
After a couple weeks of his new bad Italian food and cheap cocktails routine, his terminal finally rang with an incoming voice request. He knew it couldn’t be from Naomi. The light lag made a live connection unworkable for any two people not living on the same station. But he still pulled the terminal out of his pocket so fast that he fumbled it across the room.
The bartender – Chip – said, “Had a few too many of my margaritas?”
“The first one was too many,” Holden replied, then climbed under the booth looking for the terminal. “And calling that a margarita should be illegal.”
“It’s as margarita as it gets with rice wine and lime flavor concentrate,” Chip said, sounding vaguely hurt.
“Hello?” Holden yelled at the terminal, mashing the touch screen to open the connection. “Hello?”
“Hi, Jim?” a female voice said. It didn’t sound anything like Naomi.
“Who is this?” he asked, then cracked his head on the edge of the table climbing back out and added, “Dammit!”
“Monica,” the voice on the other end said. “Monica Stuart? Did I catch you at a bad time?”
“Sort of busy right now, Monica,” Holden said. Chip rolled his eyes. Holden flipped him off, and the bartender started mixing him another drink. Probably as punishment for the insult.
“I understand,” Monica said. “But I have something I’d love to run past you. Is there any chance we can get together? Dinner, a drink, anything?”
“I’m afraid I’m on Tycho Station for the foreseeable future, Monica. The Roci is getting a full refit right now. So —”
“Oh, I know. I’m on Tycho too. That’s why I called.”
“Right,” Holden said. “Of course you are.”
“Is tonight good?”
Chip put the drink on a tray, and a waiter from the restaurant out front popped in to carry it away. Chip saw him looking at it and mouthed Want another? at him. The prospect of another night of what the restaurant laughably called lasagna and enough of Chip’s “margaritas” to kill the aftertaste felt like slow death.
The truth was, he was bored and lonely. Monica Stuart was a journalist and had serious problems about only showing up when she wanted something. She always had an ulterior motive. But finding out what she wanted and then saying no would kill an evening in a way that wasn’t exactly like every other evening since Naomi left. “Yeah, okay Monica, dinner sounds great. Not Italian.”
They ate salmon sushi from fish grown in tanks on the station. It was outrageously expensive, but being paid for by Monica’s expense account. Holden indulged himself until his clothes stopped fitting.